Eliza Southgate Bowne (1783–1809) was an American letter-writer whose correspondence became a valued primary source on the inner life of an educated young woman in the early American republic. Life: Born in Scarborough, Maine, to Robert Southgate, a prominent lawyer and judge, and Mary King Southgate. She was educated at Susanna Rowson's Young Ladies' Academy in Medford, Massachusetts — one of the era's better schools for girls, notable for its relatively serious curriculum. In 1803 she married Walter Bowne, a New York merchant who later served as Mayor of New York City (1829–1833). She died in 1809 at age twenty-six, from complications following childbirth. Literary significance: Bowne left no published work during her lifetime. Her reputation rests on her personal letters — to family, friends, and suitors — written between roughly 1797 and 1809. These letters are prized for their unusually candid, articulate reflections on women's education, intellectual equality between the sexes, courtship, and marriage, at a time when such views were rarely put in writing by young women, let alone preserved. Publication: Her great-grandson, the critic Clarence Cook, edited and published a selection of her letters in 1887 as A Girl's Life Eighty Years Ago: Selected Letters of Eliza Southgate Bowne. The volume gave her a posthumous literary identity and remains the standard source; it has been reprinted and is frequently cited by historians of early American women's intellectual life.
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